Cottage Labs

During 2017 the City of Hull was named UK City of Culture, and hosted many national cultural events throughout the year. Cottage Labs supported the University of Hull as the official record keeper for the event to capture and preserve the digital outputs of the year.

Challenge

The University of Hull was providing support to the City Council to capture both official and unofficial digital outputs from the year of cultural events. These materials needed to be captured and archived, and also preserved for the long term. The content could come in any number of forms, and not necessarily in an organised manner. We were to help them with the back-end management of that data.

Solution

We implemented a custom workflow which knitted together several key pieces of infrastructure. The University's outsourced cloud data storage where materials would be stored, their digital repository (Hyrax), where the materials would be published, and their archiving system (Archivematica) where preservation copies would be created. This would allow the curators to produce directories of stored files with basic textual metadata in files, and have them flow through into the archiving system and digital repository as structured digital objects

Success

We developed novel code that combined three major pieces of the university infrastructure, that could be used for the City of Culture outputs. Additionally, this same infrastructure could provide additional capabilities for the university, such as supporting researchers in easily self-archiving from their cloud storage accounts.